Letting Go

Letting Go

I often have strange, vivid dreams. I’ve long made practice of journaling my dreams, which encourages you to remember dreams more frequently. I have always used this to farm story ideas. Sometimes, my brain provides other nuggets of wisdom. I have a reoccurring dream that I get angry. I don’t mean normal, every day angry …

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Committing a Crime

Committing a Crime

He had always been light on his feet. It was how he got the name; Silkfoot. He often boasted he could prance across a cloud. If he was wrong, no one would ever be able to prove it. A quick glance across the room confirmed his lumbering partner moving with the same silence, if not …

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Getting Inside a Character’s Head – Part 1: Questions

Getting Inside a Character’s Head – Part 1: Questions

Characters are central to any story. If your characters aren’t interesting, no one’s going to spend 100+ pages reading about them. Interesting characters are three-dimensional; there’s more to them than their appearance and motivation. Just as your world should have pieces that move unseen in the background while your characters are elsewhere, every character should …

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Obsession

Obsession

How do I make a man like the archmage love me? He is surrounded every day by beauty and power. He is inundated with it, steeped in it. And I am so ordinary. A skilled warrior, yes, but in an army of the elite. If it were simply a matter of skill, of proving my …

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The Admonitions Scroll

The Admonitions Scroll

When we learned we’d be leaving England, we decided to see as much as we could before our departure. Flying across an ocean is expensive, and our new destination was even further away than we started. Atop our list were more trips to the British Museum. We had visited the exhibits for all of our …

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Killing Your Darlings

Killing Your Darlings

I’ve never enjoyed editing my work (though I have come to love the end result). Don’t get me wrong; editing is a necessary evil. No writer can form perfect prose the first time around. But editing takes much more effort for me than writing. It inevitably ends up a slog. And for a long time, …

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Five Simple Self-Care Tips

Five Simple Self-Care Tips

The world is demanding these days. But it isn’t just society that piles constant demands on our shoulders. We’re unkind to ourselves, demanding ever growing quantities of productivity to feel satisfied we’ve done our best. And when we aren’t working, there’s always something else we tell ourselves we ‘should’ be doing. But it’s rare that …

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I Have a Girl’s Courage

I Have a Girl’s Courage

The terms of this prompt were somewhat more interesting than normal. The instructions are to choose a book. Turn to page 51. The first sentence of the last paragraph becomes the beginning of your scene. My sentence comes from Living Your Yoga by Judith Hanson Lasater, and reads: “I have a girl’s courage.” I have …

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